We have intensified Swapit’s deep integration with Facebook to leverage on the social media network effects and ease of sharing. Today, many people are trading on our Swapit HK Facebook group, but a lot more people are actually trading on our Swapit mobile app. More and more people are joining the Swapit mobile app every day.

Recently, we have also linked our Swapit HK Facebook Group with our Swapit App Facebook Page. That way, our two social media assets on Facebook can combine their force and amplify user engagement with our Swapit brand. This is how it looks like on our Swapit App Facebook Page:

The Swapit HK Facebook Group Stats

There is some impressive amount of trading happening in that one Facebook group since we’ve taken over the helm. Here are the key stats to date:

Total Members: 100,924 (up 66%)

Sale Posts: 165,198 (up 230%)

#1 Category: fashion

Stats as of July 26th, 2017.

While the Swapit HK Facebook group is a good place to start, everyone who wants to get more out of his trading experience, ends up using the Swapit mobile app. It allows posting on the Swapit app – reaching 200,000+ potential buyers – as well as easy sharing into our own Swapit HK Facebook group – reaching an additional 100,000 members – and on top of that, easy sharing into a number of other buy & sell groups on Facebook – reaching more than 700,000 of their members.

To sum it up: Using the Swapit mobile app is the most efficient way to list your items and close a sale.

We are still focusing on making Swapit the most efficient marketplace for buyers and sellers, it is great to see that our Swapit users do more and more enjoy browsing it and spending time inside Swapit.

We’ve been working hard on making Swapit more and more useful for our buyers and sellers on Swapit. So it is great to see that our stats are up by 91% for the time our buyers and sellers spent inside our Swapit apps (Android & iOS combined) in the last 60 days compared to the 60 days before that. Here is a chart of that:

That’s exactly what we’re working for. It is our goal to make Swapit the best trading platform for all of our buyers and our sellers. Yet an average of 5.9 minutes spent per user per day, is not even close to what social networks like Facebook for example have. However, our goal with Swapit is not to waste people’s time in our app. Our goal is very simple: Make it easy for our sellers to sell their stuff quickly and make it easy for buyers to buy products quickly. Though, it’s a good thing for us, that people appreciate our app and like to stay in there, browse around and have a good time — we do still want to make it easier and quicker for them to buy and sell. If that would mean, that the time spent inside our app goes down, then so be it. In the end, we can only be measured by the transactions that are processed through Swapit.

We’ve launched several an app updates in between, which made it easier to post items through our app, to promote it to your friends on social media and to discover new items (see Swapit Alerts, Make an Offer, 60k Facebook Group, License to Kill, Best User Experience, My Likes, Swapit Referral, and more). At the same time, we’re adding more value for our users, which we prioritize mainly based on feedback we receive through surveys and direct conversations. It’s great so many reach out to me directly and that feedback makes it directly onto our feature list for upcoming releases.

So stay tuned for the next Swapit release. It’s just around the corner and will be launched soon!

Right, we’ve also given away a great prize to the winner of our POST+WIN campaign. Make sure you join!

We are proud to announce that Swapit just recently exceeded 160,000 registered traders on our hyperlocal marketplace!

Over the past 12 months, that is an incredible increase of 2,105%! At the same time, all of our other metrics (listings, sold items, chat messages, comments, likes, etc) are growing at least at the same pace. This has a lot to do with our focus on marketplace liquidity and the growing and maturing environment of our still very young marketplace.

I recently tweeted this screen shot on the right. Being super focused on growth and accelerating that growth seems to be paying off.

We’ve done a lot of things recently to ensure more and more people are coming to Swapit and trade their stuff there. We’ve been present at public events, which come with photo ops. We made it easier to share and share to all popular social media, which spreads our Swapit item links (a.k.a. web teasers) and in turn drives more users to Swapit. We’ve brought “Make an Offer” to Swapit, which results in sales closing faster and buyers and sellers being more satisfied with our platform. We’ve made it easier for sellers to cross-post their items into many buy & sell Facebook groups reaching over 700,000 people instantly. We’ve introduced Swapit Alerts, which resulted in higher user engagement – especially on the buyer side – and therefore helps to grow our user base through word of mouth by more satisfied users. We’ve grown the total GMV posted on our platform from $1M to $30M to over $100M. To make it easier for our users to post items on Swapit, we’ve made several changes to the product, which are well received by sellers.

At the same time, we’ve been working with partners to grow our user base. We ran several promotions with happy winners, we’re constantly talking to admins of groups on social media, forums, websites to collaborate. We launched Swapit on the iPhone and its users have an even higher engagement rate. We also placed some great Swapit beach umbrellas across some beaches all over Hong Kong. I am still getting friends asking me about it, because they saw one on a beach. We’ve also gotten some great media coverage over the past months, which always takes a while to kick in.

Upcoming Growth Improvements

Of course, we don’t stop here. We are constantly improving Swapit with one single goal: Increasing our marketplace liquidity. That means making buyers and sellers happier and giving them the right tools to do their trades on our platform and not somewhere else. It also means, making it easy for them to transition to Swapit. Changes in that direction are coming in the very near future. Stay tuned for what’s to come. There will be some more great drafts towards growth.

Swapit’s user base is growing fast and our user engagement is growing even faster. While, we’re already getting users in countries like USA, UK, Philippines, Thailand and India, our main target market still remains to be Hong Kong. So for our core market, we are constantly monitoring the major districts of trading for us.

For you to get a general sense of how much is being traded where in Hong Kong, have a look at these two maps:

HK Overview

HK Island & Kowloon

It is interesting that we can see clearly the most popular trading areas along the MTR (subway) lines of Hong Kong. That can have multiple reasons:

1) People like to meet up at MTR stations, because it’s the most efficient mode of transport in Hong Kong; and/or

2) Near MTR stations are usually the large scale residential buildings – condos, etc. So the majority of the Hong Kong people live near such subway routes.

If we however, zoom a bit further in, we can see some interesting patterns. Let’s take a look at these two areas:

Prince Edward & Sham Shui Po

Central

Especially the Shek Kip Mei area (left map) shows clearly that the main indicator there is residential population density. MTR stations are nearby, but by far not as many items are posted right at the MTR stations, compared to the ones that are posted in residential areas.

The Central area on the other, shows clearly a concentration of item postings near the Central MTR station. Those are most likely either “Meetup” or “Work” location postings. Generally, population density in terms of residence, is rather low in Central.

If you’d like to check it out yourself, you can do that easily inside the Swapit on your Android phone or your iPhone. Just select the “Map” icon and browse your local map. You can also pan to other locations in the world, if you’d like to.